New West Book Review
An American Dream Turned Nightmare: “Desperate Passage”
By David Frey, 5-12-08
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Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West
by Ethan Rarick
Oxford University Press
304 pages, $28
There’s a maxim among travelers that goes something like this: bad trip, good story.
That’s partly why the travails of the Donner Party and its cannibalistic trek across the Wild West – when it really was wild – has become such an iconic part of the history of this region for over a century and a half. It’s hard to have a trip any worse than theirs, trapped in the heavy snows of the Sierra Nevada for the winter eating their dead relatives. Remember that on the family road trip this summer.
If its cannibalistic anticlimax is what we remember best about the Donner Party, though, author Ethan Rarick reaches deeper to uncover a quintessential story of America’s westward expansion, when not just adventurous thrill-seekers but pioneering men, women and children set out across forbidding deserts and mountain ranges for a chance to start over in a new land. In his book Desperate Passage,”>Desperate Passage, Rarick deftly re-creates the stories of these pioneers who risked everything for the 19th century version of the American Dream, and lost nearly everything in the pursuit.
Rarick, a journalist and director of the Center on Politics at the University of California, Berkeley, meticulously reconstructs the journey of this band of travelers mostly from their letters and journals. He weaves them into an emotional chronicle of a daring, and sometimes foolhardy, journey westward. In a journey carefully timed by settlers to miss one winter’s snows on the prairie and beat the next winter in the Sierras, the Donner Party got a late start that threatened its success from the start.
Like other wagon trains west, its members faced the threats of deserts on the one hand, blizzards on the other, and sometimes hostile bands of Indians in between. Even more dangerous could be internal rivalries, resulting in a murder amid the Donner Party long before their group turned cannibal. They took an extra risk that sealed their undoing, betting on a huckster guide who sold them on an untested shortcut into the unknown.
Despite all this, Rarick argues, the Donner Party might have avoided tragedy in the Sierras if they had simply pushed themselves a little harder on the last fateful day before the “dreaded snow” fell. Two, maybe three miles more, and the bone-weary group might have made the pass to safety. Instead, they stopped for a night that turned into a hellish winter.
Rarick writes:
The Donner Party was trapped by a cruel combination of geography and time. Behind them lay nearly two thousand miles of wilderness; ahead, an impassible range of mountains. Behind them lay the days they had wasted; ahead, months of merciless winter. No longer could they afford fanciful thoughts of new homes and farms and lives. Now the men and women and children of the Donner Party were reduced to a single, elemental goal: to survive.
Unlike early accounts which painted the Donner Party as demons at worst, fools at best, Rarick presents the Donner Party as complex characters, with tendencies toward heroism, foolishness, tenacity, hope and cruelty. He turns to their own accounts to bring to life the human elements that persisted amid their hardships.
In the course of the trek, one would die of health problems before even leaving present-day Kansas. A baby would be born. Some travelers would be abandoned or disappear. Some were killed, by accident or on purpose, or left behind. Political squabbles arose. These men, women and children were not Lewis and Clark. Facing the toughest hardships of the West, they were flatlanders – families, often – people of some means, but with little knowledge of the harsh territory around them. They were, Rarick notes, Everyman.
The hardships they – and other parties like them – were willing to endure stand in stark contrast to the ease of zipping over Donner Pass by highway today. It’s an interesting counterpoint, too, to today’s adventure nonfiction. These weren’t Everest conquerors. They were simple settlers who became strangers in a strange land.
Their plight also sheds some light on the current immigration debate taking shape throughout the West. These days, immigrants still cross forbidding deserts, sometimes dying on the way, in search of opportunities in a new land. In those days, it was emigrants, as settlers like the Donner Party were known, setting out for new lives in California. The Sierras were the border. California then was a part of Mexico, a country we were at war with.
Life was risky everywhere – cholera was cholera no matter where it struck – but the weight of the historical evidence suggests that death was more common for emigrants who braved the trip than for their more timid brethren back home.
There is another axiom among travelers: the journey is more important than the destination. That is where Desperate Passage is most valuable. It is easy to look back into history and remember the Donner Party at its most tragic moment. Rarick spins a tale of their epic journey from the beginning, long before the terrible winter that claimed nearly half the group, and finds them a safe place in American history.
Setting off from a town called Independence, theirs was a trek into the 19th century dream of the American West. They had no idea it would descend into nightmare – and the stuff of legend – before reaching the end.
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